The “Novel of Recollections”–Narration As a Means of Coming
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International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online) Vol. 5 No. 2; March 2016 Flourishing Creativity & Literacy Australian International Academic Centre, Australia The “Novel of Recollections” – Narration as a Means of Coming to Terms with the Past Petr Chalupský Department of English Language and Literature, Charles University Celetná 13, 116 39, Prague 1, Czech Republic E-mail: [email protected] Received: 23-09-2015 Accepted: 09-12-2015 Advance Access Published: December 2015 Published: 01-03-2016 doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.2p.90 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.2p.90 Abstract Among the large body of contemporary British novels dealing with the past, one specific genre can be identified, and called, the “novel of recollections” as it revolves around its first person narrator’s coming to terms with the often traumatic memories of his or her past life. This article focuses on this genre and its characteristic features, both formal and concerning the content, in John Banville’s The Sea (2005), Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011). Using the example of Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007), this article also shows that these features alone may not necessarily guarantee the text’s positive reception, suggests the main reasons why Swift’s novel failed with most readers and critics, and contemplates the novel of recollections’ future course and development. Keywords: Novel of recollections; memory; unreliable narrator; traumatic experience; added value 1. Introduction A specific and very popular form of contemporary British literature is a fictional narrative that could be given a working label of the “novel of recollections”. It is mostly a short novel narrated in the first person by an adult narrator who in his/her memories returns to his/her past – childhood, adolescence, student years – which he/she attempts to present to the reader, at least in the beginning, as a comprehensive and indisputable sequence of objectively perceived and absolutely clearly recollected events. In the course of time (and narration), however, these recollections lose this neat logical shape of unambiguous causes and natural effects, the same as the narrator’s memory proves to be unreliable, frequently embellishing unpleasant history through conscious as well as unconscious defensive mechanisms such as selectiveness, idealisation and surmising connections between disparate phenomena and events. Such an image of the past is to some extent a fiction, an imaginative story motivated by the narrator’s sincere desire to find out what really happened and his/her need to give the past a coherent and satisfactory appearance and thus make it intelligible, transparent and easily interpretable. Thus this seemingly self-contained image is exposed to stronger and stronger pressures in the form of newly discovered facts, written and pictorial materials, unexpected and surprising recollections of the narrator or other people’s testimonies, under the weight of which its compactness gradually breaks down. As a result, the narration discloses various bygone offences, unpleasant incidents and experiences which, deep inside, torment the narrator and which have substantially affected his/her life, including his/her dismal present situation, and so, in his/her thoughts he/she tries to search for their roots or to overcome a long-term urge to displace them from memory. A serene recapitulation of long forgone events therefore transforms into a dramatic and often painful coming to terms not only with the past but also with the present and, along with that, with the immediate future, with other people’s fates but, above all, with him/herself and his/her own conscience. This kind of a novel is in no way thematically original in the context of contemporary British fiction as the theme and motif of recollecting and journeying through the memory back to the past in order to achieve its better understanding, re-living or even its complete re-evaluating appears in the works of a few prominent prose writers of the last two decades of the twentieth century. We can mention, for instance, Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Last Orders (1996), Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989), Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over (1991) and Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs (1992), all of which, though to varying extent, emphasise “postmodern uncertainties in experimental styles”, tell “stories about the past that point to multiple truths or the overturning of an old received Truth”, mix genres, and adopt “a parodic or irreverently playful attitude to history over an ostensibly normative mimesis” (Keen, 2006, p. 171). However, even older influences can be traced, such as B.S. Johnson’s experimental novel The Unfortunates (1969), and Ford Madox Ford’s pioneering impressionist novel employing the device of the unreliable narrator The Good Soldier (1915). Despite this apparent thematic affinity, the novel of recollections differs from its predecessors in several fundamental aspects, both formal and where content is concerned as well. IJALEL 5(2):90-96, 2016 91 The novel of recollections also bears several related features with “trauma fiction”, which tries to cope with the indescribability, and thus the impossibility of an authentic representation, of a traumatic experience by shifting its “attention away from the question of what is remembered of the past to how and why it is remembered” (Whitehead, 2004, p. 3). By doing so, such novelists have sought literary techniques which would allow them to narrate the unnarratable” and they have found that “the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterised by repetition and indirection” (Whitehead, 2004, pp. 3-4), by which it best reflects the fact that although an individual is well aware of the experienced event he/she can never fully know and understand it. This kind of literary theory derives from the ideas of Sigmund Freud who “turns to literature to describe traumatic experience” because, like psychoanalysis, it is “interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet” (Caruth, 1996, p. 3). The novel of recollections employs similar narrative and stylistic devices, yet their main purpose is mostly not to reflect the impacts of trauma on the personality of the narrator, but to depict the process of admitting one’s guilt, becoming reconciled with one’s failure and coping with their consequences. In some cases it does not deal with a traumatic experience in the true sense of the word, and even if it does, it affects the narrator rather indirectly as most frequently he/she tends to be a witness of something bad that happened to another person. However, the principle is almost identical: an unexpected, overwhelming and painful event that is not fully grasped in its immediacy when it occurs returns later through processes beyond the control of one’s consciousness, such as “repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth, 1996, p. 91), or through some reminder coming from outside. Although the theme of memory and recollections cannot be completely separated from that of trauma, the novel of recollections, though it also works with the motif of traumatic experience, does follow somewhat different goals than trauma fiction. The novel of recollections is generally popular not only with readers but also with critics which can be demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that three such novels have won the prestigious Booker Prize in the past ten years: The Sea (2005) by John Banville, The Gathering (2007) by Anne Enright, and The Sense of an Ending (2011) by Julian Barnes, even though in all these cases the victory came rather as a surprise. Using these three books and Graham Swift’s novel Tomorrow (2005) as examples, this article focuses on the specifics of this kind of fiction, on its characteristic features and those aspects that make it attractive for the reading public. At the same time, however, it mentions its potential difficulties and pitfalls which can cause the text’s predictability, schematisation or unconvincingness, and thus shows that the formal side itself and the mere presence of a certain number of these features does not automatically ensure positive readers’ and critical reception. 2. The Novel of Recollections As they are written by renowned and established writers, a rather substantial body of critical work has been produced on the four above books, mostly in the form of journal articles and chapters in monographs. Overall, they focus on the narratives’ central themes, such as memory, grief, nostalgia, trauma, survival, personal ethics, individual choice and responsibility, evasiveness when facing one’s guilt and troubled conscience, the relationship between the present and the past, as well as between the personal, or private, and the collective, or public, history and experience. Several of them also explore the diverse narrative and stylistic forms, techniques and strategies employed in these novels, especially in the construction of confessional, testimonial and trauma narratives and their effects.1 However, none of these scholarly writings seem to have attempted to compare the books in terms of a number of characteristic and defining features they have in common, and which may therefore allow us to classify them as a distinct subgenre of the novel. The novel of recollections is a very compact and strongly subjectively tuned kind of fiction, in terms of its size and composition often bordering on the novella, which combines postmodernist and modernist narrative devices.